October 27, 2025 01:03 PM UTC

Gabe Evans And Lauren Boebert Make A Fool Of Jeff Hurd On Health Care

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: As the Denver Post reports:

Premiums will double next year for Coloradans who buy their health insurance on the state’s individual market, with higher-income families facing increases of $10,000 or more, the Colorado Division of Insurance announced Monday. [Pols emphasis]

Marketplace customers face a double hit this year. The monthly “sticker price” of health insurance is rising, typically due to the aging population and increased use of expensive care, including high-cost medications. And households will have to pay a larger share of that monthly cost than they have since the pandemic as the tax credits that subsidize insurance purchases revert to pre-COVID levels…

Critically,

The legislature reduced the average impact from about 174% to 101% by appropriating $75 million to directly subsidize customers and by putting up to $50 million toward the state’s reinsurance program, [Insurance Commissioner Michael] Conway said.

But that’s not going to prevent coverage from becoming unaffordable for an estimated 75,000 in Colorado alone.

These are the people counting on Democrats to not give in.

—–

With the shutdown of the federal government about to pass a full month, the position of the opposing sides hasn’t changed much: Democrats are entrenched behind their demand that subsidies to health insurance premiums axed by Republicans in the “We’re All Going To Die Act” budget bill be restored before millions of Americans face massive cost increases, while Republicans say they won’t negotiate those premium subsidies until Democrats give up their principal leverage in the negotiations and re-open the government with a Republican temporary spending bill.

There are a fair number of Republicans who claim to support undoing the premium subsidy cuts they previously voted for, including Colorado’s freshman GOP Rep. Jeff Hurd. Hurd is a co-sponsor of standalone legislation that would extend the enhanced premium tax credits passed as part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 for another year, a concession that if offered by Republican leadership would likely end the shutdown. But even though Hurd says he doesn’t want his constituents to face the unaffordable premium hikes he originally voted for, sticking it to Democrats in the shutdown fight appears to be more important. As he said in an interview with Colorado Public Radio during the first week of the impasse:

“I don’t think it’s right to condition opening the government on extending those enhanced premium tax credits. One of the concerns I have about what the Democrats are proposing as well, is it’s an indefinite extension on the enhanced premium tax credits and I’m not sure that that’s good public policy. I would look to something that’s more short term,” Hurd said.

Federal shutdowns have become a recurring event in recent years, including a 2018 shutdown highlighted by a dispute about border wall funding and a 2013 shutdown in which some in Congress called to halt funding to the Affordable Care Act. Hurd says the use of federal funding as a means to influence policy discussions will lead to bad government.

“I am concerned about the way that this is being addressed and used as leveraged that the government shutdown is being used as leveraged to advance this important public policy discussion,” Hurd said, referring to the health care tax credits. “My view is we need to have that discussion. It just needs to be in the context of an open government.”

Here’s the problem: while Hurd is at least paying lip service to the need to extend the premium subsidies so as not to hit consumers with massive premium hikes next year, two of Hurd’s Colorado colleagues are trashing those same subsidies in a way that strongly suggests they won’t support a compromise even if Democrats were to cave on re-opening the government. Last week, fellow freshman Rep. Gabe Evans dismissed the enhanced subsidies as a giveaway to people who he has decided don’t need help:

When they ramrodded some of their signature pieces of legislation through, when they had the House, the Senate, and Biden as the president, one of things that they did was they removed the income cap to qualify for a federal subsidy to co-pay for health care. So when the Democrats talk now about, oh, we’re trying to have affordable health care for everyone, what they’re really saying is they want to continue the Biden era, COVID era policy, by which somebody that’s making $500,000 a year can still go get a subsidy to help pay for health care…

The tiny number of cases in which this might be the case do not make up for the millions of Americans making far less, who will see premium increases they can’t afford show up in their mailboxes in the coming weeks if these premium subsidies are not extended. Evans’ friend Rep. Lauren Boebert takes a slightly different approach to the same let-them-eat-cake conclusion, simply saying it’s time for Americans to suck it up and drive on–and not in the mileage reimbursement sense:

“The fact that we are seeing rising healthcare — the costs and premiums, this is not on republicans. This is failed policy. We said it was failed policy from the beginning. Unfortunately, when Republicans had the chance in President Trump’s first term to repeal and replace, they did not; they failed at that. Now we need to have a real conversation about how to actually fix this mess,” Boebert said.

The Kaiser Family Foundation projects people living in the congresswoman’s district will see their health insurance premiums spike 306% if those credits are not extended. Private health insurance premiums are expected to rise, too.

The question for Democrats, so far resolute fighting to prevent these premium hikes with overwhelming public support, is whether giving in to Republicans on a temporary spending bill with the promise of future negotiations on the premium subsidies is more likely to result in a successful outcome than forcing Republicans to make a deal now that includes reopening the government. If it were up to Rep. Jeff Hurd, Democrats might have a reasonable expectation of good faith.

Unfortunately, Gabe Evans and Lauren Boebert have already made either a liar or a fool of anyone who says Republicans are willing to make a good-faith deal to extend premium subsidies they do not support. Speaker Mike Johnson called the same premium subsidies Hurd wants to extend a “boondoggle” less than two weeks ago.

The reason Democrats are not caving in this time is because they understand, some would say at long last, who they’re dealing with. There is no moral case to be made against amoral adversaries, only leverage to wield or to concede.